Changes always happen more quickly when they are accellerated by a shitstorm of voluminously and forcefully expressed public outrage.

Harry Belefonte tells a story of an A. Phillip Randolph visit to the FDR White House. FDR listened to APR list a litany of demands over dinner, and then told him: "I agree with every one. Now you need to organize and FORCE me to do it."

Leaders go where they think the public is going (unless they are affirmatively evil). But they need to be reminded.

I have to admit I am not as fond of the Rose Bowl as others are. M was undefeated there from 1902-1965, but starting with Bo's first season in '69-'70, the Rose Bowl was a fairly dependably sour note to end the season nearly every damn time we went. I'm happy not to dwell on that particular part of our recent history.

It seemed to start with the Brandon email. Things got very intense then and a lot of people called for your head of which but a few publicly apologized afterword. This was the climactic moment of a very dark era with hints of strange and twisted loyalties which may never be fully explained.

You must have hit a nerve then that never quit buzzing for some folk. Your life appears to be fine nonetheless, you have my respect. No further comment.

the corrupted, ethically-challenged and utterly faithless NCAA counts them doesn't mean we have to. I mean, this is your own metric, isn't it? Why not just include the condition "wins involving collaboration with and enablement of pederasty are automatically vacated?"

If you take off about 10 wins for every season from when Paterno started suppressing evidence of pederasty and rape in 1976 to when he was dismissed, I think PSU drops safely off the list.

That was the year the Ohio State faculty senate turned down the Rose Bowl invitation, and Minnesota went two years in a row while the Pac-8 and the Big 10 continued to play without a Rose Bowl contract in effect.

Only two OSU players were kept off the field by injuries in 1961. That year was an encapsulation of Woody's best and worst tendencies.

Didn't know this. At the time that OSU was seeking a successor to Woody, the only coach they had not harrassed out of town since before 1951, Cooper was 1-0-0 against M, Bo and QB Jim Harbaugh in the 1987 Rose Bowl. Since they were being impatient, a hasty decision was the natural outcome.

I have relatives in that fanbase. They were mildly dissatisfied at the time, despite holding their own in the rivalry.

more than I, mainly for the abrasive simplicity with which he embraced the Rivalry. I delighted in the bad publicity that his many outbursts brought to himself and his mission.

However, I hesitate to oversimplify and minimize the stature of what he brought to the game. The Gator Bowl punch rightly ended his career, but on the way there there was:

The Ohio State Faculty Senate's refusal of the 1962 Rose Bowl invitation in December 1961. Accounts vary, and it was apparently (PDF)team co-captain Mike Ingram who addressed OSU students demonstrating against John Fullen and the Faculty Senate and told them to go home and study for their exams. Even so, it is fair to say he was speaking for Hayes, who told an alumni group at the Hollendem Hotel in Cleveland the day the decision was handed down the following (Roy Terrill, SI (online archive), 9-24-1962 ):

I would not want football to drive a line of cleavage in our university. Football is not worth that.

"One of those boys came to me and said he had only one pair of pants. 'Can't you get a loan?' I asked him. 'I tried,' he said, 'They told me it would take four months.' Hell, a pair of pants can get to be awfully dirty in four months. Sure I gave him the money."

Player safety:

For two years his boys have been wearing a plastic helmet cushioned on the outside, to protect others, as well as on the inside. "Of course this outside padding isn't doing us much good," he grumbles. "Everyone should use it."

Hayes has even plotted the area of greatest incidence of knee injuries—it is an arc 20 yards laterally from the point where the ball is positioned to start play—and says this is another reason why his teams run inside the ends most of the time.

Even when an Ohio State halfback gets loose, he is instructed not to hug the sidelines but to stay at least a yard inside the field. When penned in, the runner has room to ride with, and better absorb, a hard side tackle.

In the spring practice of 1962 not one Ohio State football player was even dazed from a blow on the head, and they do not play patty-cake in an Ohio State scrimmage even in the spring. . . Last season only two Ohio State boys were unable to start games because of injuries.

Back in the day, of course I loathed the man who helmed the team I feared and hated above all others. But in judging others, let us remember the words of Wilhelm Furtwängler: "It is a fallacy to suppose that greatness arises from a lack of flaws."

was an indirect primary source for a quotation. I have been taught to cite primary sources where available even if they aren't the proximate source for cited information.

Most people I know are unaware of the interwar consequences of the British Blockade and famine, let alone the existence of a bibliography of titles on the subject. I picked the element thereof already connected with other cited sources. I can't tell if you would rather I had not mentioned it.

of slinging three two provocative new jabs, you interpolate the words "let's just not argue." I don't think it works like this; in fairness, a response is mandatory, but I'm fine not calling it an "argument."

One:

I invented "cannot" when I was told 900,000 deaths = 400,000...

I don't know where this comes from; but it appears that are pointing a finger at me. Here is what I said:

Approximately 400,000 to 900,000 of these . . .

and then

Not all numbers agree, for methodological or political or whatever reasons, . . .

I have trouble believing that a reader of MgoBlog like you is innocent of the concept of approximation, ranges of estimated values or extraction of data from conflicting sources. This statement is therefor plainly astonishing. At any rate, if you are hoping therewith to transmit the blame for your manufacture of "cannot" to my humble self, I don't think this will do it.

This is too vague to contest, but it comes close to calling me a liar, and I object. "Manufacturing denial" is a locution perilously homophonic to the metaphorical Third Rail of "Holocaust Denial." Just in case, I refer to the Edwin Black books I linked above if there is any thought of laying that slander at my feet.

In any case, if you are going to call someone a liar, you need to at least make your accusation clear enough to permit an answer.

I don't like spending time justifying and defending myself, but the only thing worse is not doing it when it is clearly called for.

Since you bring up Noam Chomsky, I hope you don't mind if I express amazement at the idea that Chomsky is less read than the late Howard Zinn. (Maybe I look at it in a different way than you do.) Zinn's bibliography runs to dozens of titles, but I have always imagined that the bulk of his fame is from his People's History, which has sold, per WIKI, 2,000,000 or so copies in its first 36 years. Chomsky is from a more purely academic background, and his bibliography runs to hundreds of titles dating back more than sixty years; his published political commentaries date back to ca. 1967. I think the MSM are more rigorously controlled now than they were back in the day; it was not unknown to see Chomsky or his contemporary Gore Vidal on primetime television facing off against mainstream figures like William Buckley. According to the NYT, a single of Chomsky's titles, Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance, was in a print run of 250,000 books after two-and-a-half years, albeit with the help of a mention at the UN in a speech by Hugo Chavez. I knew of Chomsky before I knew of Zinn. I don't know how to begin to acquire the data to test your comparison objectively; it doesn't appear to be readily available. Given a reputation well-established in certain circles and a catalog of published political commentary going back four-and-a-half decades, I wouldn't dismiss the range of Chomsky's influence that lightly.

I would like to end on the note that "there are good people on all sides of history." I don't think imperialistic governments are that different from one another as people seem to want to think they are. I also don't think that people are that different from one another as imperial governments seen to want us to think they are, either. WIKI has attributed the essense of their following paraphrase to Viktor Frankl: "He often said that even within the narrow boundaries of the concentration camps he found only two races of Men to exist: decent and unprincipled ones."

To second your point, I'd like to finish by naming three "good people" on different sides of history: John Rabe, Managing Director of the Siemens offices in Nanking at the time of the Japanese invasion, who used the swastika flag as a shield against occupying forces to save 250,000 Chinese from Japanese atrocities (diaries recently discovered and published); Japanese Consul-General Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas, Lithuania, who considerably exceeded his authority in extending Japanese transit visas to thousands of Jews threatened by the tenuous state of the Soviet-German relations in July 1940, an action that saved maybe 6000 lives and, finally, Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson, a helicopter pilot who blew the whistle on the My Lai massacre while in progress and personally rescued 12 individuals from the midst of the slaughter by posing his helicopter in front of intended victims and confronting the pursuing members of 2nd Platoon, C Company directly.

you state that the flu pandemic death toll cannot be separated from the deaths attributed to the blockade then you overtly state that they were excluded. Which one is it?

If you go back to the original wording:

It is harder to separate those deaths in Germany from those caused by the famine because malnutrition frequently serves as a backdrop while opportunistic diseases pick off those who have been weakened by hunger . . .

you will find that your representation "cannot" is your own invention; I never said any such thing. I said "harder." "Harder than what?," you might ask.

Let's consider the backdrop for flu deaths in the US in 1918-9. If you go to Gutenberg[dot]com, "WWI casualties," column headed "Excess civilian deaths (due to famine, disease & accidents)," the entry for the US is blank, which a glance at the rest of the table will tell you means "0." In an epidemiological setting like this one, it can be accepted in a general statistical sense that sometimes a flu death is just a flu death.

What about a more complex setting for for overall demographic disease etiology, say the combined flu pandemic and blockade-induced famine in Germany in 1918-9? I think it would be justifiable to say "It is harder."

Today, an invisible malnutrition touches the lives of approximately one quarter of the developing world's young children. It quietly steals away their energy; it gently restrains their growth; it gradually lowers their resistance. And in both cause and consequence it is inextricably interlocked with the illnesses and infections which both sharpen, and are sharpened by, malnutrition itself [emphasis mine].

Now, going back to the situation in Germany in 1918-9, does this mean that no public health officials or other experts attempted, then or later, to separate the composite strands of morbidity and mortality? That nobody made the effort to parse the question, "Would this child have died of flu due to the flu pandemic absent malnutrition due to the famine, or not?"

It appears (World Library) that a December 1918 report by the German Board of Public Health and two studies by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in 1928 and 1940, all reported numbers both for "civilian deaths over the pre war level primarily due to food and fuel shortages in 1917–1918" and for "Spanish flu deaths in 1918." Not all numbers agree, for methodological or political or whatever reasons, but this distinction is made in each of the three.

If you look back at my original language, I said:

nevertheless, [emphasis added; you may have missed this word the first time -- this is an example of what is called nuance] the public health officials of the time have made that distinction.

So now, regarding your question, "Which one is it?," I think you will have to agree that not just one or the other but both of my statements are exactly correct as originally formulated, as unbelievable as it may seem.

I am not going to go through your entire comment line by line in this way; even if I had the endurance to write it no-one would have the patience to read it. If you read both my and your comments carefully, I think you can deconstruct your argument yourself using the above as a model.

To speak generally now, this whole comment situation arose in the midst of a conversation in which the rise of Hitler was being discussed as a more or less abstract question of political science as if it were a discussion of a typical American election year. "In a vacuum," to use your own words, reflecting, I think, a generally low level of awareness of the British Blockade and of its immediate and long-term effects both inside and outside Germany on the part of the general American public.

I don't propose to expound on whether the Blockade was a legitimate tool of war or not (the experts have argued this point for 100 years), but I suggest that the rise of Hitler is one of many historical judgements on the long-term consequences of this kind of warfare against civilian populations.

If you consider the word "domino," I think you can conceptualize how the NS government can be held accountable for its own deeds without implying that Nazism came out of a vacuum, to use your word again.

I did refer to some of the omissions in the mainstream historical record of the US in response to the challenge, "to give the Nazis and their allies a pass because we did bad stuff is ludicrous." It works both ways; I point out that the US narrative of the US role in the victory over NS Germany serves as the opening to a larger system of obscurantist manufacture of consent.

You do a service pointing out the profitable involvement of much of the US big business community in the darkest dealings of the NS government. Edwin Black has done yeoman work in bringing this era out of the shadows of the historical record, for instance in his book IBM and the Holocaust. I didn't enter into this because it doesn't apply directly to the question of how Hitler came to power in the first place.